My Engl 2089 portfolio represents and includes all of the important developmental parts that led up to my community project and final research report. It can be said that each piece acts as a place in the timeline of my journey in this course and my goal for creating change in my community. Specifically, my portfolio builds on five learning outcomes of this course:

“Analyze how multiple discourse communities make, communicate, and debate meaning through various genres and writing practices.” For the first outcome, I found the community of my previous high school, where throughout this course I developed my plan to make a difference. With this development and shown in my writings, I spent a lot of time understanding how my community operates in order to make my goal even more meaningful.

“Use multiple tools and methods to conduct focused inquiry-based research and formulate original conclusions that are important to specific discourse communities.” For the second outcome, using the idea of inquiry-based research I created a survey and an interview full of questions which I provided to my community and an important stakeholder within the community. Their responses gave me a stronger perspective of the feelings and thoughts of my community and allowed me to further develop my goal for this course.

“Produce various genres that reflect knowledge of the writing practices, purposes, and conventions of relevant discourse communities.” For the third outcome, in this course I was able to further develop my writing process specifically in a way that better connects with my understanding of my community.

“Select appropriate social and collaborative processes for drafting and revising.” For the fourth outcome, the feedback I reserved from my professor and peers were integral in shaping how I navigated the goals for this course. Having this outside perspective and opinions allowed me to better develop my various works and ultimately the difference I made in my community.

“Articulate what they know about how discourse communities make, communicate, and debate meaning, and how that knowledge can be used in their own academic, personal, social, and professional lives.” For the fifth outcome, to push the goal of my project to those in my community, I developed it in a way that applied best based on what I learned about my community. I feel as though I definitely made a difference, but I was also able to inspire a positive difference in myself through this experience.

As well as this, my understanding of the key course terms discourse community, rhetorical situation, inquiry-based research, genre, writing process, and reflective writing have developed over the time of taking this course. Looking back, it is apparent that throughout this course each assignment involved these terms in some way. Interestingly, my knowledge of these terms was improved just by working through this course.

This course was very valuable in improving my skills in writing. Going into this course, the idea of writing big papers full of words was a daunting task. Beforehand, I had never really strived to do too much over the maximum requirement. Though, specifically in this course I have written more without it being required. I believe this was due to my passion for my overarching goal and from the improvement of my writing process. I have been able to better streamline how I develop and flesh out my essays. I have figured out that I tend to write in blocks to develop my ideas and to work out the frame of my essay. These tend to be short bursts of sentences where I write down what I have and come back to add more as I go. Therefore, I prefer typing essays, as this process is much more effective. I also find being able to draft a work and then edit it incredibly valuable to my writing process. I have been able to explore the intricacies of my process by practicing and further developing my skills in this course.

My beginning apprehension of working with long papers applied in some part to the process of writing a research report. Though, it is apparent that this course was able to present it in a way that was intuitive and interesting. I thought it was really neat to see how important pieces I wrote beforehand worked as a puzzle piece that fit into its place in my report. I have always aspired to know more about this process, as reading other’s reports often always spikes my interest. I just needed this kind of motivation to start exploring this writing possibility. I am very proud of how my research report turned out.

As well as this, the process of developing and implementing a community project as a whole turned out to be very important to me. I was nervous about how I was going to help make a difference in a community. Nevertheless, I stuck through it and did my best to develop something I was proud of, and the results and experience itself are incredibly valuable to me now. I could already notice the difference I brought to my community, which was an incredible feeling. I found developing each part, like the survey, interview, literature review, and actual project to be fulfilling and now critical to my skill in writing and further. Having the opportunity to explore these various aspects will absolutely benefit my work in the future. I am glad I kept up my motivation and pushed through this course, each part was worth the work. My advice is to keep trying and never give up, you hear it all of the time because it is absolutely true. Go out there and make a difference that others will benefit from!